On_Culture is an open access e-journal, conceptualized and edited by researchers at the GCSC. The focus of the journal is on transparency and openness as well as reflexivity and processes of metaization in dealing with concepts in the study of culture. Therefore, the journal hosts a wide range of formats and modes of presentation: peer-reviewed scholarly articles and review essays as well as artistic and experimental contributions.

On_Culture serves as a platform for all those who wish to reflect collaboratively upon current discourses in the study of culture. We propose the development of emergent themes, concepts, and methods as a collective process. Our aim is to facilitate this process and to disclose the cultural dynamics at work in it.

Workshop: Addressing each and every one: Popularisation/populism through the visual arts

April 21 and 22 2016, Justus Liebig University Gießen, Main Building (Ludwigstrasse 23), 3th floor, Seminar-Raum

The workshop brings together scholars from art history, film studies, theatre studies, political theory, sociology and philosophy of religion from several European countries. It discusses the ways (iconic figurations, aesthetic styles, rhetoric figures etc.) through which visual culture addresses its audience and gets involved in the constitution of a public sphere. It is in particular interested in how the visual arts – understood as both visual popular culture as well as fine arts – becomes involved in popularisation practices and populist criticism.

The workshop approaches this subject by focusing on the central iconic figure that these practices bring into play: the “everybody” (which stands for “all of us”, but is at the same time also a “nobody”, a “common man”, a “common woman” and sometimes even a “new man” or a “new woman”). It presents spotlights of a genealogy and an iconography of the everybody and discusses political and philosophical theories about how the mediating force of this iconic figuration can be understood and valuated. In doing so, the workshop pays particular attention to the ambivalent role this figure plays, especially in most recent history, in triggering both desire and enthusiasm as well as resentment and hate.

I would like to draw your attention to a call for artistic contributions
that will be presented during the graduate conference on “For What It’s Worth: Nostalgia, Sustainability and the Values of the Present” at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) Giessen, from 28 – 30 April 2016. The conference team and the exhibition organisers intend to facilitate _Creative Encounters _between academic research and artistic research. +

THE DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS IS JAN. 10TH, 2016. The GCSC can offer a contribution to the travel expenses as well as to the material expenses of the selected artists/researchers. For information and submissions, please contact: fwiw-art@gcsc.uni-giessen.de

The interactive lecture series “Cultural Approaches to Law and US American Legal Culture” invites its participants to understand law not as an independent body of rules but as inseparable from culture, narrative, images, and political economy. The particular focus of the individual lectures will be on US American legal culture(s). Guest lectures by scholars in cultural legal studies, political science, anthropology, and US American history will enable participants to examine law from several perspectives.

For the period May 5 through June 10, 2015 the full exhibition will be shown in Café Amelie in Giessen’s Walltorstr. 17. There will be a gala event on Thursday, May 21, 2015 from 6-8:30 pm with prosecco and finger food. In addition to opening words by Alexandra Müller, we will have a special guest with us for the evening. Ana Bilankov, a Croatian filmmaker, who deals with the topic of cultural amnesia will present her experimental documentary entitled “In War and Revolution” (2011) and answer questions. This short film deals with the personal and cultural amnesia that occurred during and following the war in Croatia in the early 1990s. Her work brings up questions of the possibility of fixing time and memory through artwork.

In May 2015 the conference “Law’s Pluralities” will take place at Justus Liebig University Giessen/Germany. In a series of keynote presentations by experts and in panel sessions and discussions, as well as in an exhibition it will explore cultural constructions of law.

The interrogation of the cultural construction and negotiation of legal practices in the conference „Law’s Pluralities“ offers an interesting occasion for the presentation of an exhibition of artistic works dealing with the topic. The international artistic positions reflect on the social and legal frameworks and find means to visualise phenomena that often remain abstract. Furthermore here the artistic interventions themselves contribute to the differentiation and development of “legal writing”. Through their explorations, contestations and subversions, they participate in an alternative production of knowledge and function as mediators of and shape legal practices. The exhibition will be located at the conference venue and in the close-by “Neuer Giessner Kunstverein”, a local art association. This will expand the exhibition’s and conference’s reception towards a non-academic public open the discourse on the politically and socially relevant topic to a larger public. Among others works by Il-Jin Choi, Raul Gschrey, Mi You & Manu Luksch will be shown.

The publication Experiencing Space – Spacing Experience: Concepts, Practices, and Materialities of the GCSC conference at Ruhrtriennale 2013 was finally released. The book is available at WVT Verlag. Containing also one of my articles:

Interdisciplinary approaches to the intersection of space and experience, which comprise an emerging research topic in the study of culture, are few and far between. This conceptual volume maps the rapidly developing international field of research related to the presentation and representation of spatial experience as well as the experiential interfaces of space and experience – particularly in light of new directions in research, which include the exploration of space as a ‘cultural-theoretical’ or ‘psychogeographical’ category. Weiterlesen →

Crisis is not exceptional in capitalism but its constant companion. It represents the foundation from which the modern/colonial world system has evolved. This conference draws on critical feminist economics and decolonial feminist thought and practice on material matters. The question of materiality has emerged as a central topic in recent years. Under the umbrella term “new materialism”, this interdisciplinary and multifaceted academic debate seems to have revived a Marxist vocabulary. Yet, the question of why “materiality” matters in times of crisis capitalism is rather absent in this debate. We are considering this question by three inter-related aims: first, to examine from transnational feminist perspectives the impact of the global crisis on people’s livelihoods; second, to explore the theoretical contributions of the triad of feminism, coloniality and political economy; and, third, to consider critical feminist economics and decolonial approaches to thinking alternative economies and convivial futures.